Idiocracy’s Theory of the Future
January 12th, 2011 | Published in Art and Literature, Political Economy | 5 Comments
Mike Judge's [*Idiocracy*](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) is a pretty smart and funny movie, which touches on some themes I've recently [written about](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/). But it's also a widely underappreciated and misunderstood film. Perhaps that's because one of the people who seems to misunderstand it the most is its own writer and director, Mike Judge.
The basic premise of the film, as per IMDB:
> Private Joe Bauers, the definition of "average American", is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes 500 years in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.
The rest of the film is an extended satirical riff on this idiotic future society. Its residents are both unbelievably crude and endlessly capable of falling for consumerist marketing bullshit. With regard to the former: Starbucks now offers hand jobs, everyone regards reading and thinking as activities for "fags", and one of the film's set pieces involves a #1 hit film called "Ass", consisting of nothing but the image described in the title. In a climactic scene Joe Bauers (played by Luke Wilson) addresses Congress, wistfully declaring that:
> there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!
Meanwhile, everyone in the future mindlessly repeats advertising slogans as though they were a scientific consensus. The threat of famine looms because everyone insists on watering crops with a noxious energy drink called Brawndo, while insisting that "it's got electrolytes . . . they're what plants crave!" It's left to Joe Bauers to convince his moronic fellow humans of the virtues of old fashioned water.
This sounds like the sort of thing your average anti-corporate liberal might enjoy, although I'd note that liberal yuppies are [hardly](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L2fsubA2-c) [immune](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg) to this sort of irrational marketing hype. But the movie made a lot of people uncomfortable, and it has been mostly forgotten since its 2006 release. In part, that's because of the generally elitist "most people are idiots" vibe that Judge evokes. But more specifically, I think it's because of the film's overtly misanthropic, eugenics-minded opening:
This [reaction from Manohla Dargis](http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/movies/04extract.html) is typical:
> "Idiocracy" expresses the kind of fear lampooned, consciously or not, in the old joke about revolting masses. (Messenger: "The masses are revolting!" King: "You’re telling me!") It opens with a comparison between trailer-trash types, with low I.Q.’s, who freely propagate, and smarty-pants types who fret about conceiving, using every excuse to find the perfect time to have children. In the end the low I.Q.-ers overrun the intelligent, who die off, which is funny if you think that only certain kinds of people should reproduce. An equal-opportunity offender, Mr. Judge can wield satire like a sledgehammer, so it’s no surprise that he doesn’t bother with the complexities of class and representation in a bit about the dire consequences of a birth dearth.
This bit of the movie is every bit as offensive and reactionary as Dargis suggests at is, and its stupidity is pretty much summed up in this [xkcd cartoon](http://xkcd.com/603/). But the tragedy of the whole movie is that *this premise is totally unnecessary*. It's completely possible to explain the emergence of the *Idiocracy* future based on sociological and political-economic themes that have nothing to do with genetic determinism, while leaving the rest of the movie mostly unchanged.
To me, one of the most interesting and suggestive bits of the movie is the following exchange toward the end of [the story](http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ina22/splaylib/Screenplay-Idiocracy.htm):
Joe and the Cabinet Members are gathered around a VIDEO PHONE
talking to the CEO OF RAUNCBO, who's in his office, panicking.
We hear people rioting outside his building and occasionally
bottles and debris hit his window.
RAUNCHO CEO
What happened?!
JOE
Ah... Well, we switched the crops to
water.
RAUNCHO CEO
I'm not talking about that.
(points to a computer
screen, freaked out)
Our sales are all like, down. Way
down! The stock went to zero and the
computer did auto-layoff on
everybody!
ATTORNEY GENERAL
Shit! Almost everyone in the country
works for Rauncho!
RAUNCHO CEO
Not anymore! And the computer said
everyone owes Rauncho money!
Everyone's bank account is zero now!
What does this exchange tell us about the film's implicit [theory of posterity](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/social-science-fiction/)?
1. The future economy is highly automated, to the point that even the management of companies is done automatically by a computer.
2. People nonetheless need money to pay for things, which they get by working for Brawndo (which is called "Rauncho" in this earlier version of the screenplay). It's not clear what they do for their money, but it can't be very important in light of their obvious stupidity and the above-noted automation.
3. The continued stability of this society is therefore dependent on the existence of a business which does not actually improve anyone's material standard of living--indeed, it is *decreasing* it by killing all the crops.
The theory of posterity the grounds *Idiocracy*, it seems to me, is a close cousin of [Anti-Star Trek](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/): an economy that needs humans as consumers, but makes them mostly superfluous as producers.
So how does this explain the fact that everyone is such a moron? Well, consider what would happen to education in a society like this. If the productive economy is all run by computers, then there's no need to teach people how to make things, or how anything actually works. On the contrary, it would be economically beneficial to encourage delusions about the magical properties of consumer products, the better to ensure that people will continue to drink Brawndo rather than water. In other words, there is no economic incentive to produce intelligence. We can imagine that at some point in the past, legitimate institutions of higher education were dismantled (perhaps by the people Diane Ravitch discusses [here](http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewrongstuff/archive/2010/05/17/diane-ravitch-on-being-wrong.aspx)), and replaced by things like [Costco Law School](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes?qt0427921).
I really wish someone would make a movie that's as funny as *Idiocracy* without falling back on such lazy right-wing premises. On the other hand, it's intriguing that Judge could end up making a film that mostly functions as a radical critique even though it's based on a reactionary assumption. *Idiocracy* does illuminate a dangerous trend in contemporary capitalism--one that has nothing to do with the wrong people having babies, and everything to do with a system that increasingly reproduces itself by producing stupidity in the population. The movie's only mistake is to think that our genes can save us from stupidity, when it seems far more defensible to say that "intelligence" is some combination of socially nurtured ability and [statistical myth](http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html).
April 18th, 2012 at 6:42 pm (#)
You could argue that society is merely an expression of genetic tendencies (say like Dawkins suggests in the Extended Phenotype), hardwired into the brain like facility for language or tendency toward religious belief. So I would say that both you and Judge are correct, although if you really want to change the way society works, you’ll have to change the way the human brain works.
November 10th, 2012 at 1:45 pm (#)
You could argue that, but you would be wrong. It was not a sudden shift of genes that made and unmade the Soviet Union, nor the partition and reunifiation of West and East Germany. Nor was it a rapid shift in genes that created the Welfare states of Scandinavia nor a countershift that has started to unravel them over the last few decades.
September 9th, 2013 at 2:50 am (#)
If I turn on my television set… I would suddenly slump into a depression, because indeed, the nightmare would be true! We are barreling toward an idiocratic society.
As I see nipples and boobs jiggle by on daytime television I can hear the quote echo in my head …. “I’m batin’!!”
It’s appalling what garbage makes its way to mainstream movies/tv.
Intelligent (seemingly at least) people are complacent with the unapologetic deluge of female objectification in media.
I’ve also observed so many individuals who just can’t spell. They some how manage to ignore the spellcheck feature?
Just a side note.
November 25th, 2013 at 7:51 am (#)
Turn off your television and read more books about anything that interests or concerns you. Look on the internet for things like TED talks, SAND conferences, lectures on youtube, etc.
The last time I tried watching tv, I felt the same way. But then I remembered that I know a lot of people who no longer even have television, and are part of communities of careful progressive-thinking.
For now the internet (though heavy with advertising) is not controlled or censored by governments or corporations, at least in most countries.
November 25th, 2013 at 7:44 am (#)
Nature vs Nurture. This is a very heartening article, & I would agree that culture and education is more important to human intelligence. The movie Idiocracy is a simplified generalization of multiple factors accounting for the centurial decrease in IQ. It is not a reliable scientific documentary, just a dumb comedy that did what it was supposed to do, which is bring into light the issue of “what if this??” That said, it’s hard to ignore the trend of frivolous pregnancy among those who make poor life decisions. And there IS something to be said, at least in some small part, for genetic biological factors, which are passed on in part through reproduction. Studies have shown that IQ is statistically higher among babies born from cesarian sections, which are necessary in the event of oversized brains.